


Microcosmic

by jasp



Category: Myst Series
Genre: Gen, and a dash of bahro style linking headcanons, classified as 'crack taken seriously' losing a fistfight with a character study, feat. the criminal underfunding of public works, yeesha's identity struggles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:53:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28082715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jasp/pseuds/jasp
Summary: At 2:17 am local time, Yeesha linked cleanly into the public library of a New Mexico town. She would make of herself a microcosm; if her heritage could be reshaped within her, it could be reshaped without.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Microcosmic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [faceofstone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/gifts).



Yeesha was capable of many things, but she couldn't link to places that she had never seen, not with any specificity, at any rate. If she had written an Age herself, was as familiar with the dimensions behind its description as she was with her own name, then certainly - she could pick out this or that pinpoint of a location from the glimmering void of in-between, recognizing in it the echo of her handiwork. Perhaps, too, if she had studied an Age's descriptive book thoroughly - but this was an extremely rare privilege, and she never had quite the same intuition for another writer's thinking as she had for her own.

No, far more often she did things the mundane way: once she had reached her destination, broadly speaking, she traveled by foot. In many Ages there was peace, if not always joy, to be found in traveling. The landscapes were often dramatic and sparsely populated, and they offered a great deal of time for self-reflection, penitence, and wonder. If she wished to know a place, she would walk it. Yeesha wished to know the Earth, and so she walked.

She could only walk so far, however, before she would need to come face to face with Earth's inhabitants. Even the inhospitable sea of desert surrounding the Cleft was speckled with small settlements and cut through with roads that, while not busy, were far from untraveled. Had in fact been traveled for hundreds of years, if Atrus' stories were anything to go by, every patch of land offering itself up to wandering human feet that bore the weight of necessity or convenience.

Indeed, those people and their structures and their cultures were much of what Yeesha wondered at. But she could not bring herself even to think of presenting herself among them, tainting the mostly unsullied distance that had existed between her kind and theirs. In their endless conceit, the D'ni had named this Age after themselves, and yet its native inhabitants survived thanks to D'ni's willful isolation. An isolation that should continue - that she worked to ensure would continue. That her existence was itself a hypocritical lapse in that crucial work was not lost on her, but for that she could only repent and work harder. She would make of herself a microcosm; if her heritage could be reshaped within her, it could be reshaped without.

She had, of course, tried to learn from afar, asking those closest to her about this half-home of hers. Her father's knowledge reflected the place he had grown up: deep but narrow, insular, confined to the life and land in his immediate surroundings. He could name all the species of flowers and mammals and reptiles in the area, knew the percentile composition of elements in the sand. But of his grandmother's homeland he did not even know the name; only that it was cool, and green. And in Yeesha's time with Zandi, she had only ever gleaned fragments of understanding. Speaking with him granted a holistic sense, perhaps, of a particular sort of human, and certainly a great deal of concrete knowledge of the implements of his daily life (camp stove, petroleum engine, canned food, air conditioning, and anything else she could get her quizzical hands on). But still it was only a drop from the river, and on the occasions that he referenced the greater state of affairs that their corner of the world was embedded in, Yeesha only found herself confused, then both frustrated and thrilled at the scale of the questions she still had.

So, during the night, she walked. She avoided houses, stayed beside but out of sight of roads, and circled around the artificial twilight fringes of settlements. She traced the worn pages of borrowed town maps and tried to imagine what words could be bound to the shape of the ground, tried to imagine the named silhouette of a building as a pinprick of light in limbo.

At 2:17 am local time, she linked cleanly into the public library of a New Mexico town.

"A humble place," she remarked, a small wave cresting above the flow of her thoughts. She had seen individual houses larger than this building. It was one story only, packed with bookshelves that herded themselves to either side of a large, high desk. She found the light switches nearby, and pale fluorescence flickered to life overhead. Neutral colors, low ceiling, hard carpet. She could hardly judge its architecture against any but the libraries of Ae'gura, even the smallest outlying branches still grand and spiraling. "Less love for the written word when it appears inert. Poor judgment," she concluded, just as quickly. Words need not reach across Ages to be alive - to be powerful, or liberating, or dangerous. Foolish the ones who thought otherwise. The D'ni had used their words to reduce, to exploit, to burn. They knew the power of their weapons and enshrined them as such. She, too...

The door behind the desk was locked; she linked just to the other side and, after failing to make out anything but outlines of furniture in the darkness, flipped the light switch on there as well. Cabinets, a countertop, a table and chairs, a microwave (this, and the coffeepot next to it, she had also learned from Zandi's home). A place to rest, and eat; familiar enough, if also poorly furnished. She returned to the main area and continued her investigation.

A message board near the front door announced classes and community events (she didn't know what a "bake sale" was, but could make an educated guess). A section dedicated to books for children attempted to look livelier than its drab surroundings, with bright paper signs pasted to the wall indicating different genres, and a series of round, stuffed chairs scattered around the floor. A basin attached to a wall spouted a thin stream of water when nudged; the pictographic signage indicated it was for drinking. A door sat to the side of the basin, and through it was something resembling a washroom - at least, it had a basin with a faucet, and a larger, lower basin perched on the floor nearby. Yeesha could guess at its purpose, but the design was wasteful and perplexing to say the least. She pressed the button on it and watched the water in it spiral around and away and shook her head. Bewildering.

There was nothing else besides; as she had first supposed, it was a humble place, with a bare attempt at comfort for those working or reading there. She had perhaps hoped for more, some depth of meaning beyond financial neglect echoing from the architecture, but regardless, peeking into the side rooms wasn't her primary goal. Her attention turned finally to the collection of volumes. She threaded through the shelves like a creek through a canyon. Fiction, the sign read overhead; the titles were uninformative but evocative. The imaginings people tell themselves - it had been some time since she had held an unfamiliar story. She resisted the urge to pull a colorful paper-bound book off the shelf and dive into its incomprehensibility. No doubt any given one of them would be difficult for her to follow at best. "I should ask Zandi for suggestions," she murmured, as a reminder, and moved on.

Non-fiction - blocks of hard volumes with the same covers, small numbers and letter ranges inscribed on their spines. Encyclopedias, they said on their introductory pages, collections of information about Earth and its peoples. She flipped the first one open idly to a page in the A's. A nation, a landscape, a picture, a map. The descriptions swam. They felt clumsy. Yeesha had easy fluency in many mother tongues - her father's English, her mother's Rivenese, and above all the D'ni they both handed down to her from their own perspectives on it. No matter what she heard or read, there were moments when she felt it lacking by comparison in one way or another, and these geographical layouts were especially so, clunky and unspecific without the merciless clarity of _gahrohevtee_. Practically useless for anything but the broadest understanding. Her stomach flipped and she turned to another entry. The damnable Art would forbid her even this attempt at mutual comprehension.

She sat down on the floor with the volume and read line by line alphabetically, digging through the strata of densely packed columns and photographs, waiting for the tumble of excavated words to settle over the worries clouding her thoughts. The more she read, the more she would be able to think in the way she was reading, a way that was both borrowed and her own, by birthright if not by experience. If she read enough she could chase all but these words from herself. She could sequester the noisy existence of her own way of thinking, could live above it, could imagine its tremors as mere quirks of the ground she herself had laid, could--

She set the book aside, rested her palms flat on the well-worn carpet and imagined she could feel down to the foundations and below, into soil and sand and rock. "You," she began tiredly, reverently. "Contained D'ni - all of it, enveloped. And yet those on your surface are untouched by and unconcerned with those beneath it. They lived, they continue to live, with no knowledge and no harm done besides." Knowledge that she had been born and raised into, even at a distance; still, she had embraced it, sought it, driven it further into herself, until there was a shape within her that could perhaps be emptied and refilled but would always remain as evidence of what she had been made into and had made herself into, by inheritance, by envy, by hope. The words she poured into it would have no choice but to fit to the cavern within her - English, human, the stories, the places, the people.

"Not them," she continued, thoughts bleeding in and out of voice. "No, not them. I am them, too." But more, and not entire. She couldn't be entire. "Like you, rather." She patted the floor as if it cared to hear. "All I see is through the shape of my own words. Even crumbled away, they leave their shape. D'ni is not all of me. Your people are not all of me. D'ni is within me." Even if it wasn't anymore, it had existed long before life breathed within it. "D'ni would have always been within me." She yearned for the people here, to be... "Not the people," not so much as the ground they walked upon.

What was within her had of course never been merely D'ni, no matter what marks her understanding had left over the years as she prodded at the center of what she was and tried to mold what she found. Like any Age, she was more than the words on the page. She was the history stretching back that made those words possible, and stretching before her was the future as it could potentially move according to the shape of her. Plate tectonics and the sound of water. Layers of life and death shifting along a valley. The bird that builds a nest in the crumbled corner of an ancient abattoir is affected by the bones sticking out of the soil, perhaps, but it still lives a worthy existence.

"Yes," she said simply, feeling something shift in her understanding that settled the tangle of her thoughts. Not perfect - never perfect - but better. In thinking of herself, and of D'ni, and of the ancient carved space it had inhabited within the Earth, she thought also of the DRC, their work ongoing, just as hers was ongoing. She sighed, and opened the encyclopedia back to the entry she had left off at. It was only several hours and the light of dawn, creeping in from the shaded windows and the locked glass doors, that chased her from the shelves.

(Zandi was already awake when she returned, standing outside and holding a mug of coffee. She spoke of herself to him as she spoke of the Age, old and weathered and containing far too much, and defined by the containing, and he laughed.

"Nothing," he said, to the bewilderment in her eyes. "That's just a very 'you' kind of thing to say." Before she could ask, he gestured to the camp table planted in the sand next to his home. "You're just in time. Have some breakfast?"

After a moment, she sat, and watched the sun rise to the scent of frying eggs and butane haze, and thought about what sort of novels he might recommend to her.)

**Author's Note:**

> For faceofstone - Yeesha is challenging to write, so often lost in her thoughts and so averse to company. A little company can pull her out when she gets really sidetracked though, perhaps - a mooring back to an immediate reality that matters just as much as wherever she was sailing in her mind. And breakfast, of course.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!


End file.
